Jarvis: GoFundMe? Just go get me the information

The Downtown Windsor Business Improvement Association is seeking information from the city on the decision to replace retail space on Pelissier Street with more parking.Tyler Brownbridge / Windsor Star

It’s a surreal low in Windsor politics. The fact that the Downtown Windsor Business Improvement Association filed two Freedom of Information requests on council’s controversial decision to convert the commercial space in the Pelissier Street parking garage to more parking demonstrates its cavernous lack of trust in the city.

The city’s $13,672.20 bill for the second request demonstrates an equally yawning lack of respect for the organization fighting a daily battle to revive a struggling downtown.

And downtown businesses resorting to crowdfunding to raise the money? What a spectacle.

DWBIA chairman Larry Horwitz hopes the information he’s seeking – emails, text messages, notes and records between the mayor, council and administration – will help reverse the decision. But there’s no chance of that. Clearly, the city is digging in.

The campaign had raised $2,840 by Friday, but it will be difficult to raise the entire amount. The DWBIA probably wouldn’t get the information in time anyway. The storefront tenants will be kicked out in 13 days. Construction is expected in July.

Horwitz can appeal the decision to Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner. But that usually takes months.

Yet this is far from a losing campaign. It’s a brilliant way to make a bigger point. Steep fees and long waits are obstacles that governments can erect to prevent people from getting information. Is this what you get when you ask pointed questions, demand answers and challenge decisions?

“They work for us,” Horwitz has said of city hall.

A nice sentiment. They should.

This isn’t the first time the city has barricaded itself from its citizens. It refused to release emails on Transit Windsor’s decision to reject a Save Ojibway ad on municipal buses.

You get the disturbing feeling that some people at the city believe they’re doing the public – citizens, voters, taxpayers – a favour by granting it information that it’s entitled to.

People who have donated to this campaign don’t like that.

“I think there should be some clarity on the issue, and it shouldn’t have to be something that costs $14,000,” said Andrew McIntosh, principal cellist at the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, who donated $25.

Maybe the city believes it has spent enough time answering Horwitz’s questions. Shouldn’t Horwitz decide when all his questions have been answered?

Nobody who understands successful cities – not urban planners, downtown residents and businesses – understands council’s decision to spend half a million dollars ripping out storefronts that can draw people and replacing them with parked cars. It defies everything about vibrant streets. And in Windsor, it only adds to a glut of parking in an underpopulated core.

There wouldn’t have been a Freedom of Information request if the city had handled this better, if it hadn’t reversed its original position at a closed meeting, if it had made more of an effort to fill the commercial space, if it had seriously considered the proposals that were made. But it didn’t.

The city and its downtown business organization should work together to revitalize a core that remains blighted even after millions of government dollars have been spent on it. Instead, the city is demanding almost $14,000 from a DWBIA budget that is supposed to support something both sides want: downtown business.

“Every city in the world is building arenas downtown, they’re building farmers’ markets downtown, they’re bringing bicycle paths into the downtown,” Horwitz has said. “We’re doing the opposite, and this is just another example.”

Whatever perceived shortcomings Horwitz had as a mayoral candidate, he sees what’s happening – the lack of support for measures that work in cities around the world. He understands Windsor is headed in the wrong direction. And he understands the potential consequences.

But he continues to fight. You have to admire that.

“Until it’s too late, it’s not too late,” he said of the parking garage. He donated the first $500 to the campaign.

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